


Double A-Side

by propergoffick



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Songfic, dark night of the soul, getting over all that bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 01:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13330716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffick/pseuds/propergoffick
Summary: Just looking in on two girls, in love, paying the price. Life isn't easy, but it is life - for as long as it lasts.





	Double A-Side

> They flutter behind you, your possible pasts  
>  Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost  
>  A warning to anyone still in command  
>  Of their possible future  
>  To take care
> 
> [\-- Pink Floyd, 'Your Possible Pasts'](https://youtu.be/E-ve_sgdgZs)

Max doesn’t wake with a start. She doesn’t jump out of her skin. She doesn’t sit bolt upright. She used to, when the guilt was still fresh, when the nightmares were still new, when the memories first started to fade into one another, when every single time made her wonder -

_Was that just a dream?_  
_Was that just a memory?_  
_Did I Rewind in my fucking sleep or something?_  
_Is she still here?_  
_Am I?_

These days, Max skips to the end. The warmth at her back, the smell of old sweat and stale coffee - that’s real. The person feeling and smelling and touching to confirm all this - they’re also real. The rest is… not an emergency. Maybe not even a problem. Maybe not even _her_ problem.

Her head is killing her. When this happens… which is most mornings, now… it feels like someone has dug a king-size metal fist into her brain and _squeezed_ until she wishes the front of her skull would just blow open.

But Max is used to it now. It’s most mornings. So she wriggles across the bed, rather than scrambling out of it, and she rifles through the crap on her dresser until she finds her pain pen, and she gives thanks to a God she doesn’t quite believe in that Chloe remembered to refill it last night.

That girl’s better at looking after Max than she is at looking after herself. But then… that’s why they’re here.

Max has only ever liked smoking when it’s second-hand, and this elegant solution had come along just in time. Chloe ripped her over it for six months, of course, because pot had finally been gentrified enough for little miss hipster’s delicate tastes. She’d still spent weeks Googling around to find hash oil that wouldn’t fuck Max’s brain even further than it was already fucked, though. In one of life’s little ironies, the safest stuff came from Oregon.

The fist releases its grip slightly. Max’s first and second specialists had told her the brain couldn’t actually feel pain, as if that was supposed to stop her head hurting. With the edge taken off that, Max can fumble her way through the rest of the routine. Self-examination - her face is slightly sticky, but not hot. Environmental check - OK. She’s at home, in bed, the lights are out in here but on outside, a glimpse through the curtains suggests Portland is still there, and with a tiny bit of effort she can read the numbers on the clock. Nearly two a/m. What day is it? That’s beyond Max right now. She takes another, gentler hit, and wipes her cheeks and lip with the back of her hand.

She’s safe. Safe as she ever is. Safer than she ever was. Safer than she ever could be.

Another hit. It’s not that she doesn’t _want_ to think about the others, whose timelines she crossed and whose lifelines she severed. It’s that she’s thought about them for so long. It’s that _everyone_ leaves a trail of missed opportunities and unlived lives behind them. Max got to see them, be them, and leave them behind, because she chose to be _herself_. This one. This one right here. This one who owes her existence and allegiance to the living, and her grief to the dead. This one who’s come to believe… accept… claim… admit…

… that they were victims of circumstance. Act of God. Not Act of Max.

It’s true enough that she can sleep at nights.

Mostly.

* * *

Chloe stirs. Someone’s fucking alarm… it’s Sunday, why the shit is there an alarm… it’s not hers, because it’s an actual _bell_ , actually _ringing_ , which means it’s Max’s piece of old-school shit and one day, _one day_ , Chloe’s going to stick that fucker in a fucking big cannon and fire it into the fucking sun -

\- but not today.

Instead, she rolls over, reaches over sleeping-through-the-alarm-clock-because-of-fucking-course-she-is Max, and turns the bastard off as gently as she can manage. And since this leaves her basically spooning Max anyway, she curls around this tiny soft idiot who - for some insane reason - loves her enough to dare the whole universe into keeping her alive.

It’s not the easiest thing in the world to think about, but Chloe thinks about it anyway. Every day she feels like a waster. Every day she feels like a dead end. Every day she feels like a piece of human garbage who belongs dead. Every. Single. Day.

Because she can’t afford to be. Because she knows the high cost of living, and she pays it, same as Max does. When you know exactly how lucky you are to be alive, you fucking live, because otherwise what the fuck was the point in the first place?

You don’t get to go back on that. You don’t get to choose life, and then piss it away.

Besides, Max needs her.

Not just in the “I love you forever and ever in any time and any place and any plane of reality” sense, although yes, but in the “turns out time travel really fucks up your brain-meats” sense and the “I have _hella_ PTSD from that time I killed you and that time I watched you die and that time I was kidnapped three times in one day and that time I chose you, definitely, being alive, because I didn’t ask for any of this but I still feel like that’s my fault because I’m Maxine Fucking Caulfield and that’s how I roll” sense. And, y’know, the ordinary, commonplace “also I have the ambition of something that grows out of holes in walls” sense.

Sacrifices have this way of balancing out, and on her bad days Chloe wonders if that’s why she’s here, because she feels like she should be paying back the balance owed on one (1) Chloe Elizabeth Price, and if she’s living for and through Max and not herself -

\- which is _bullshit_ , because as Max keeps telling her, she kicks ass. Like - it’s one thing to say “I worked two and a half jobs to put my crazy-ass girlfriend through college and kicked her into making something of her life”. It’s another to say “I worked two and a half jobs because I _wanted_ to, because I fucking hate the thought of us owing anyone anything ever again, because why should I stop at doing one thing when I’m good at all this other shit?”

It’s just that -

\- she has the opportunity because of Max. Because Max fucking loves her. Because she fucking loves Max. And even if there wasn’t this huge cloud over exactly how and why they owned up to that, they’re still them. They’d still have all their bullshit to live with. Max would still be a total doormat who hides at her own exhibitions, and Chloe would still be permanently wired to blow every time something she’d fixed yesterday still manages to break down. Chloe would still have to wipe away tears and settle nerves and talk up every bit of work and draw out what’s really the problem here, and Max would still have to trip up every rush of anger and ask about the good times even if she didn’t need Chloe to carry her memory around, because it’s good for Chloe to drag that shit out for herself.

And they’d still have to live with that. Every single day.

So they do.

> Fourteen years have passed  
>  Since that day  
>  Your stories are the same  
>  But the ends have all changed  
>  You carried on like you were  
>  Some type of god  
>  Some things will never change  
>    
>  \-- [Murder By Death, 'Brother'](https://youtu.be/983uyf0BQqI)

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the greatest fic in the fandom, nope  
> This is just a tribute.
> 
> OK, so it's not really a tribute to destiny_smasher's All Wounds, but I read that before I wrote this, and there's an influence there, mostly in how time travel has broken Max's brain. If you want a longer, harsher 'coping mechanisms' fic, read that, it's brilliant.


End file.
